Alan Johnson: That is a nonsensical position by the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman. The simple fact is that the Opposition support the introduction of a biometric passport. The introduction of such a passport means that there will be a national identity register, which will contain people's addresses. The hon. Gentleman shakes his head—so he would have a biometric passport, but no means of linking it back to the individual who took it out. That argument is absolute nonsense. Exactly as now, if someone changes address, they should inform the passport office, and if they do not, there will be a fine, because we want to ensure that the people who receive passports are the people who say that they want them. The nonsense of the Opposition suddenly turning into civil libertarians, which was news to many of us, and the nonsense that identity cards are somehow an Orwellian concept from "1984" would be a complete mystery to 24 of the 27 European Union member states that have them.

Alan Johnson: I will consult with the authorities to see whether a platinum identity card can be posted to my right hon. Friend straight away.

Karen Buck: What representations has my hon. Friend had from social landlords, local authorities and others about the effectiveness of means by which they can act as witnesses on behalf of those who are victims of antisocial behaviour? In so many instances, the people who are the victims of such behaviour are too frightened to give evidence in their own right and instead look to others to act on their behalf, but in my experience there is a long way to go before we find that that is working effectively.

Alan Campbell: To some extent, the problem is demand-led, but my hon. Friend is right that we need a robust framework to ensure that when those practices need to take place, they are carefully monitored. The Government are also keen to find alternatives to animal testing. We are committing to that not only our political will, but increased resources.

Alan Johnson: I disagree with the right hon. and learned Gentleman that we have a one-sided extradition treaty. I have looked at it carefully over the past few weeks. An awful lot of hyperbole is spoken about this issue—it is almost as if the US were an enemy of this country. The current extradition treaty with the US ensures equal co-operation between the UK and the US. This issue comes up periodically; I remember that it came up in relation to the Natwest three when I was at the DTI. Perhaps hon. Members will remember the marching through the streets in relation to that case, but it all went very quiet— [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) says from beyond the Bar that he was one of the people marching, but we did not hear much after the Natwest three pleaded guilty and were prosecuted. I do not believe that we have an unbalanced treaty; I think that it is a fair treaty between the US and the UK, and one that serves both countries well.

David Hanson: It is sometimes important to use out-of-court disposals to ensure that there is swift and effective justice, and that we reduce police bureaucracy, exactly as the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) has requested. That is the reason why those out-of-court disposals are taking place. They have a positive benefit for the victims. They also have the positive benefit of not criminalising very young people who would otherwise go on to become involved in much more serious crime downstream.

Gisela Stuart: May I pass on the apologies of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden), who would be here if he were not stuck in traffic on his way to the House? May I also point out that Whips, who usually have to remain silent, are none the less present? For instance, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Steve McCabe) is present, but is unable to speak on behalf of his constituents.
	I hope that none of the parties will use the MG Rover affair as a political football. Having referred it to the Serious Fraud Office, Ministers have less influence on the timing of the final report than they had before. Once the Minister has been given an indication of how much longer it might be delayed, will he engage in serious discussions of whether the trust fund can be released before its publication? I think that after four years, the most important aspect of the affair must be the position of the workers. They have been most affected by it, and they have a right to look to us to resolve it as quickly as possible.

Ian Lucas: I have, of course a great deal of sympathy for the former workers at MG Rover. I well understand their frustration over the time that the investigation has taken. However, as I said earlier, the investigation conducted under the Companies Act was an independent investigation, and it would not have been appropriate for the Government to curtail it. It has been a complex investigation involving a great deal of work over a longer time than any of us would have wished, and for that reason I hope that the further step of referring the matter to the Serious Fraud Office can be dealt with as soon as possible. However, as I have said, the Serious Fraud Office is an independent body, and the matter is now in its hands.

Michael Moore: May I, too, thank the Secretary of State for an advance copy of the statement and the White Paper? However, I echo the shadow International Development Secretary's plea for a full debate on this substantive issue as soon as possible. In a world of enormous disparities of wealth and life experience, we clearly have huge moral responsibilities to provide official development assistance, as the White Paper recognises. However, in a world that is increasingly globalised and interdependent, and where the consequences of poverty, conflict and climate change affect all of us, there is also a clear national interest in supporting developing countries as they tackle challenges of an unprecedented nature and scale.
	We on the Liberal Democrat Benches will study the White Paper carefully, but we certainly support the identification of conflict and climate change as key priorities, alongside the still-important focus on poverty, hunger and disease. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the White Paper does not signal a departure from the primary pro-poor focus of his Department? The resources required to deliver on the priorities are underscored by the welcome continued commitment to the 0.7 per cent. target, but we still have no indication of how that spending level will be reached.
	In the absence of a comprehensive spending review, will the Secretary of State publish his Department's detailed planning assumptions, showing how it wants the resources to be allocated in the run-up to 2013? In the absence of a strategic defence review, will he tell us how other Departments will be reconfigured to make effective use of the welcome extra resources planned for conflict issues? On interdepartmental working, will he confirm that as he allocates funding to deal with climate change and conflict to other Departments, his Department's increased resources will not simply be laundered to the MOD and others to bail them out of the Government's overall Budget crisis?
	The Secretary of State's ambitious agenda is being set out at a time when his Department continues to reduce its staffing complement. Surely that means that ever-larger cheques will be written to international organisations, so how will he ensure that he achieves his avowed intent to improve accountability and transparency in the provision of development assistance? Finally, he pledges the rapid delivery of the recent G20 commitments, but how can anyone take that seriously when a key part of it, the G8 countries, have failed miserably to deliver on the Gleneagles promises of four years ago?

Douglas Alexander: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his welcome endorsement of the themes of conflict and climate change in the White Paper, and indeed for his broad agreement, if that is not to prejudge the debate that I hope we can have in the months ahead on the themes that the White Paper sets out. I am happy to give the confirmation that he seeks that the focus of the Department will remain poverty reduction—the pro-poor focus, as he describes it. The themes that emerged in the White Paper reflected the insights that we have garnered in recent years, which showed us that to deliver fully on the millennium development goals and that pro-poor agenda, we needed better to incorporate climate change, and the challenge of working in fragile and conflict-affected states—and indeed with the whole multilateral system—than we have perhaps done in the past.
	As for the Government's position on forward public expenditure, it is of course the Government's long-standing position that we will meet the target of 0.7 per cent. by 2013. The credibility of that claim rests not simply on its recent reiteration by our Prime Minister, but on the fact that as recently as the previous spending review, we were clearly on track to meet that commitment, and that continues to be the case.
	On the hon. Gentleman's rather inelegant but challenging phrase about interdepartmental working and the laundering of the DFID budget, I would simply ask him to reflect on the fact that it is not a former Prime Minister of the Labour party and a former Foreign Secretary of the Labour party who have, in recent days, argued for the reincorporation of the Department for International Development into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; that proposal came from Members on the Conservative Benches. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we are sincere in our commitment that DFID should remain a separate and distinctive Cabinet-rank Department that is determined to work effectively with our colleagues in the Foreign Office and in the Ministry of Defence.
	In relation to the issue of accountability and transparency that the hon. Gentleman raises, we have listened carefully to recommendations from the International Development Committee on how we could improve our website to make sure that there is a searchable facility whereby we will be able to provide better and more accessible information, not just here in the United Kingdom, but internationally.
	On the hon. Gentleman's final point, I can assure him that, in the days between now and L'Aquila and in the preceding weeks, the British Government will be and have been arguing with our G8 colleagues that now is the time to publish what could be called a Gleneagles framework whereby the whole world will be able to judge by the time of the L'Aquila summit which countries have met their Gleneagles commitments and which countries have fallen behind. I welcome the fact that as recently as last month one stated categorically that the British Government were meeting their Gleneagles commitments. I hope that in the days between now and L'Aquila, other countries will reflect on their responsibilities and set out credible recovery paths.

Malcolm Bruce: I thank the Secretary of State for the White Paper, and for taking account of many of the recommendations of the International Development Committee. He is right to say that in the present climate aid is needed more, not less, and we need public understanding and backing for that. On the conflict country support, will he clarify how many fewer countries the Department will operate in? If 50 per cent. of the bilateral money is going into conflict, what will that mean in a situation where multilateral donations are rising? Can he put a figure on the sum we are talking about?

Peter Lilley: I welcome the Secretary of State's emphasis on growth as the only sustainable route out of poverty, and I am delighted that he has decided to reverse the mistaken and long-standing decline in the share of aid going to agriculture and infrastructure, but does he agree that the countries that have been most successful in growing out of poverty are those that have traded out of poverty? Will he therefore put more emphasis on extending duty-free, quota-free access to all low-income countries, not just less-developed countries, and on making more generous and simple the rules of origin, which at present inhibit many countries in taking advantage of duty free access?

Douglas Alexander: I know that the right hon. Gentleman has prior knowledge of many of those issues from the globalisation report that he published some time ago, but, as the Minister of State, Department for International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas) suggests from the Front Bench, in relation to economic partnership agreements, some progress has been made on one of the issues that the right hon. Gentleman addressed.
	On duty-free and quota-free access, however, there is a judgment to be made about whether we should push the development part of a multilateral deal, or whether we best serve the interests of developing countries by going for a comprehensive conclusion to the Doha round. It would be a great risk at this stage, with the election of a new Congress party Government in India and a more realistic prospect than there has been recently of a breakthrough on Doha in the months ahead, if we averted our gaze from the prize of a Doha deal and looked at what would, none the less, be an important part of a deal for developing countries.
	I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that no Government have been stronger in their resolve to try to conclude the Doha round than the British Government. Our own Prime Minister continues to take a very active role, discussing with Pascal Lamy and others what progress can be made, and, as I have said, on the basis of certain changes among key players, I feel a cautious optimism that we may see real progress in the months ahead.

Douglas Alexander: From a sedentary position I hear that it is not the position of Conservative Front Benchers. They do not seem to command the support of the former Prime Minister, the former Foreign Secretary or the prospective candidates of the Conservative party: quite whom they speak for is really for them to answer.

Shailesh Vara: The House is aware that many of the countries to which funds have high levels of corruption and the leadership probably have overseas bank accounts. In the interests of proper accountability, is the Secretary of State able to give us a percentage of the amount of money given by his Department that reaches the people for whom it is intended rather than a Swiss bank account?

Douglas Alexander: It is a sad fact that corruption is both a cause and a consequence of poverty, and it is almost inevitable that if we have a Department focused on global poverty reduction, it will be working in environments where there is a real challenge in relation to bribery and corruption. It is for exactly that reason that we put such emphasis on building the capacity and public financial management of those countries. However, we have a zero-tolerance policy in relation to the misuse of British aid, and if the hon. Gentleman is aware of any examples of aid being misused anywhere across our global network, I would be grateful to take receipt of them.

Douglas Alexander: I should correct. the hon. Gentleman. I emphasised in my remarks the fact that we are taking forward our spending on malaria. I am glad to say that we will be increasing the number of treated bed nets that we were committed to prior to the White Paper, because I have seen for myself in developing countries, and our experts have seen, case after case in which insecticide-treated malarial bed nets can make a huge difference to the rate of infection and reinfection. That is why I made a judgment that we should not end our commitment at 2010 but take it forward thereafter, and I am proud to reiterate that today.

John Hayes: I beg to move,
	That this House deeply regrets that young people are amongst the principal victims of the recession; is profoundly concerned that limits on entry to higher education mean tens of thousands of suitably qualified young people will be left without a university or college place in autumn 2009; is concerned by reports that graduates face the worst job prospects for decades; regrets that the number of young people starting an apprenticeship is falling and that the number of young people not in any kind of education, employment or training has risen to nearly one million; regrets that Ministers did not support proposals to fund 25,000 new Masters degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects in this year's Budget; and calls on Ministers to refocus Train to Gain provision to provide 100,000 extra training places and support the thousands of apprentices who risk losing their training places during this recession.
	Youth is bound to hope. Benjamin Disraeli wrote that
	"the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity."
	As the recession bites, young Britons are being bitten hard; their hopes torn apart, their futures damaged. I move this motion, in my name and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends, in sorrow. We are sorrowful for the school leavers who hoped to go to university but will not; sorrowful for the graduates who hoped to find good jobs but cannot; sorrowful for the forgotten army of 1 million youths not in education, employment or training, who once dared to dream but now do not. Every Member of the House should share my sorrow that Britain in 2009 has come to this, and share my anger at a Government who could have done more and should do better.
	As the economy shrinks, unemployment grows. The number of NEETs went up even in the good times. As the economy grew, we failed to give opportunities to young people, so what hope for them now? I hope that the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property, who I know is a man of good faith and cares about these things, will apologise for the fact that we failed to provide opportunity for so many young Britons in constituencies such as his and mine. He knows that, as the economy grew and jobs were created, three out of four went to people coming into Britain rather than to people already here. As the demand for skills grows, the number of learners in further education plummets, advanced apprenticeship places fall and adult learning has all but disappeared from communities throughout the country.
	As Britain's chance to compete becomes ever more dependent on a highly skilled, educated work force, the number of people with level 3 skills and above remains less than that in France and in Germany. According to the OECD, Britain is ranked 17th out of 30 nations for the number of people with above-low skills. The UK suffers from a burning skills shortage; throughout industry, companies are firefighting that disaster and need a swift and effective response to the crisis. Almost two thirds of companies need skilled workers to satisfy demand, with shortages particularly keenly felt in the energy, water, engineering and construction sectors, according to the training provider, Empower Training Services Ltd.
	I want to put it on record that I value the work of trade union learning representatives—I know that that applies to those on the Treasury Bench and hon. Members of all parties. They will therefore be as interested as I am to consider the TUC's most recent report on Britain's skills gap. It states that throughout Europe, between 40 and 45 per cent. of young people between the ages of 20 and 24 are in education or training—nearly double the UK rate. It states that 40 per cent. of adults aged 25 to 59 in work in the UK have no education beyond the age of 16, compared with 32 per cent. in France and only 13 per cent. in Germany. It also states that in France and Germany, between 60 and 65 per cent. of the population have qualifications equivalent to NVQ level 2 or above compared with only 40 per cent. in the UK.
	I hope that Ministers will not go into denial today. I hope for a refreshing bout of honesty when they speak in the debate. If that happens, it will be clear that the number of those not in education, employment or training has grown by approximately 50,000 under Labour. The Government themselves class one in six 18-year-olds as NEETs, the highest figure since records kept under the current method began in 1994. We are failing those youngsters—failing to give them hope, opportunity and a chance to be the best they can. Failing them means failing us all; it is not right that Britain's hopes should be dashed in that way. The Government know that it is not right, and we know that they are not right for Britain.
	Let us consider details that some on the Treasury Bench will find difficult. I do not want to be unnecessarily unkind; none the less, the House and the people whom we represent have a right to explore those details. First, let us consider university entrants. University clearing places are expected to fall by two thirds—that is why we highlighted university entrants in the motion. An estimated 16,000 new course places will be available on A-level results day, compared with some 43,000 in 2008. Despite that staggering fall, research suggests that demand for degree courses increased by almost 65,000. The Government have effectively put a hold on the number of university places in September, due to growing pressure on public finances. There are expected to be around 650,000 undergraduate courses this year. Any chance that the Government ever had of reaching their 50 per cent. target now looks remote.
	The Million Plus group of universities says that that cap will leave thousands of bright teenagers on benefits. It states:
	"Young people who might have gone to university face the real prospect of being relegated to the ranks of the long-term unemployed, with all the personal, family and health... consequences which this brings."
	Interestingly, unlike in earlier recessions, a wide range of social groups will be affected. The group argues that everyone will be affected, from working-class school leavers to middle-class students. Some research suggests that students from the least advantaged backgrounds who, typically, tend to apply later for university, may be worst hit. That is certainly the view of the National Union of Students. Indeed, NUS president Wes Streeting has said:
	"I have no doubt that those worst affected will be from the very backgrounds this government has sought to attract."
	So much for widening participation.
	It has been reported in  The Times that
	"when the Government cut 5,000 places for this autumn, just as the recession was prompting record numbers of applications, a serious squeeze became inevitable."
	The Higher Education Funding Council has warned universities that they will suffer a cut in funding if they try to increase numbers. What does that mean in practice? The Minister knows the answer, so I hope that he will endorse, if not every word I say, then much of the sentiment. As a result of the changes,
	"popular universities will stick rigidly to their offers so as not to exceed their quotas, rather than allowing some flexibility for promising candidates who don't quite make their grades. And there will be far fewer places in clearing".
	That is what all the reports from the universities and elsewhere are telling us.

John Hayes: I would never want to say anything disparaging about Plymouth—or indeed any other part of this kingdom—and I would particularly not want to disparage our higher education system. However, it is absolutely right that, knowing the figures, people who consider their futures at school and beyond will increasingly look to those courses that are most likely to reward them with employment. That is a natural consequence of the process.
	I am not utilitarian: I believe in study for its own sake. I believe in the power of learning, because it elevates people and builds a better nation. I believe in education for democratic citizenship. One of the reasons why I so resent the attack launched by Ministers on adult and community learning is not that adult and community typically takes people into further study and then into employment, although it often does, but that it has a worth beyond all that: it has a value for its own sake.

Natascha Engel: I apologise for it in advance, but I want to make a political gibe. [Hon. Members: "Oh, no!] When I worked in the union movement, I was involved with workplace learning, so I know how difficult it was after 1997 to rebuild the apprenticeship system that had been completely destroyed before 1997. Where we have got to now is an absolute miracle, given where we started from—as I say, after the complete destruction of apprenticeships and all kinds of workplace learning.

David Lammy: I will come on to the subject of young people who are not in education or employment, but the hon. Gentleman knows that if he is right on this issue he should support the September guarantee, and he has not been able to do that. He also knows that there are more 16 to 18-year-olds in education, employment or training than ever before in our history.
	Of course, the hon. Gentleman is right that any downturn will affect the young. That is the nature of this debate and that is why all the things that we are doing to invest and support them are so essential. However, he will not help those young people if he cuts adrift the skills on which their parents depend through Train to Gain. He has repeated again to the House, to my great surprise, that he would abolish the Train to Gain budget and he has done so against a backdrop in which the CBI and the Institute of Directors have said that they depend on Train to Gain. He would abolish it—how would that help? How would it help the young people who are dependent on those apprenticeships? How would it help the 61 per cent. of companies that say that it helps their productivity or the 66 per cent. of companies that say that it helps their competitiveness? How would it help them to come forward and offer apprenticeships?

John Hayes: Of course, we acknowledge that some good work is done under Train to Gain. However, I said that it is cost-ineffective. Perhaps I can ask the Minister to comment on a statistic? There were 666,800 Train to Gain starts in the first nine months of 2008-09 and 290,000 Train to Gain achievements. With that rate of success, it is hard to defend a policy that the Government are putting all their emphasis on. They have all their eggs in this basket. Would they not be better backing apprenticeships, adult community learning and the kind of policies that I have laid out?

David Lammy: We are backing apprenticeships. That is why we rescued them and they are now up to 250,000 starts. We are backing adult learning. That is why we have a transformation fund of £20 million and why we put £210 million into informal adult learning every year. The hon. Gentleman's party has set its face against the deputy director of the CBI, who said that he was "concerned" by the plans of the official Opposition as Train to Gain is a programme that is designed to ensure public funds are invested in training and that it delivers improved business and work force performance. Miles Templeman of the Institute of Directors has said
	"the principle of the initiative has great merit and the focus of policy should be on improving the service rather than diverting funds away."
	That is what he has said, and that is why we have invested that £1 billion.
	Surely it is axiomatic that we cannot impoverish the parents of our apprentices, many of whom rely on the skills for life programmes, the literacy programmes and the numeracy programmes. Many of them do not have GCSEs and have taken the opportunity to get those level 2 skills. How can anyone take that away from them and away from companies and then say that they would divert the money to apprenticeships having already said that they will cut £610 million from the budget? The House deserves better. The hon. Gentleman knows that, and I am frankly surprised by the nature of the debate that he has set out this afternoon, given its importance.
	That is why we have invested in programmes such as Aimhigher for our new graduates—again, the Opposition were opposed to that—and funded universities to reach out to those from disadvantaged backgrounds, through summer schools, university taster lessons and mentoring schemes. Every university in the country now has links with local and regional schools. We have increased student support with 40 per cent. of students now expected to receive a full grant on top of a very generous loan. Again, we have been opposed when we have attempted to increase the budget that we give to our universities. Since 1997, we have increased investment in higher education by 25 per cent.
	The hon. Gentleman will also remember when he talks about the base of employment that our young people need to go into and when he talks not just about the skills but the sectors of the economy that we will need to rely on in the future—I suspect that that is why he made the recommendation in relation to masters programmes in science, technology, engineering or mathematics—that essential to that will be our science budget. Again he will remember that, in the 1990s, leading academics campaigned to save British science. We came to power; the campaign wound up. We have doubled the science budget and safeguarded it with a ring fence. I would love to hear whether the official Opposition will match that and keep the ring fence. The research councils are now receiving £2.4 billion more than they did in 1997. The Universities Funding Council—from what I heard this morning, I understand that it is one of the non-departmental public bodies that might be abolished, although it safeguards the autonomy of our universities—has also seen its budget rise exponentially.

David Lammy: I think that  Hansard will demonstrate that I did no such thing, and I will not be bullied into thinking that I did. I should just say that I am incredibly proud that this Government have taken the participation rate up to about 43 per cent. That is a huge achievement. What really impresses me, and should really impress the whole House, is that when one looks behind those figures at constituencies such as mine, Tottenham, or at Camberwell, Peckham, Brixton, Moss Side in Manchester, or inner-city Sheffield, one sees that in constituencies in all those areas, there has been a rise of more than 100 per cent. in young people from the poorest communities going to university. I applaud that. It is a noble ambition, and one that we should retain by investing. I have to remind the hon. Gentleman that that is a marked contrast to the position of his party when it was in office.
	The Conservative party tried to expand higher education, but it did it on the cheap. Public funding per university student fell by 36 per cent. The learning experience of students and the financial viability of universities paid the price for that. Lord Patten of Barnes, a Minister in that Government, has admitted publicly that that Government doubled the number of students by halving the investment in each of them. As he said, that meant
	"poorer pay, degraded facilities, less money to support the teaching of each student."
	That is his record in government, and we can never go back there again.
	The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings doth protest too much. If the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) is to be believed, the Opposition's proposed cuts in education would mean cutting 32,000 university places. Who has got it wrong, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire or the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings? We need an answer.
	We should not forget that getting a place at university has always been, and should be, a competitive process. This is a nervous time for students and parents, as they wait for A-level results, but this year, as always, every student who has an offer from a university and meets the grades will get a place. Against a backdrop of expansion, with 300,000 more students in the higher education system than in 1997, we should remember that we are talking about a competitive process. In any year, the proportion of applicants who gain a place is around 80 per cent. Britain's world-class university system, which produces a record number of universities in the highest positions in the league tables, deserves the very best applicants. But those who are unsuccessful on their first attempt often reapply, and 80 per cent. are successful second time round.
	We also recognise that this year's graduates face a more challenging labour market than has been the case for many years. We are not alone in that. This is a global downturn and its effects are being felt everywhere. In China, 1.5 million graduates failed to find jobs last year, a 500,000 increase from 2007. In the USA, over a million graduates lost their jobs in 2008. But, as Carl Gilleard of the Association of Graduate Recruiters said today,
	"though things will be harder, their degree is a valuable asset and . . . there are still opportunities out there for those who do their research".
	The statistics bear this out. The unemployment rate for those with graduate-level qualifications today is three times lower than those qualified to level 3 or below. The report from the Association of Graduate Recruiters also showed that graduate jobs are still out there. Nearly 40 per cent. of the top graduate recruiters are increasing their graduate programmes, or holding recruitment steady.
	For graduates who are unable to secure a job, we are taking action. We launched graduate talent pool, a new website that brings together a graduate matching service, information and guidance and an employer response line. Employers can now upload details of their internship vacancies, and graduates can register their contact details ready for the full service that will go live later in the summer. Microsoft, Network Rail, Marks and Spencer and the police service are just some of the companies up and down the country that are offering internship places.
	I am pleased that we have secured over 4,000 confirmed internships so far, and I hope the hon. Gentleman will do all he can to ensure that companies, businesses and organisations increase their number of internships. My Department is pledged to increase the number of internships. I am not sure what the hon. Gentleman has been able to do in that regard.
	We are funding 29,000 graduate-level volunteering places through the organisation v. We are funding 3,000 extra places for graduate entrepreneurship training and help with business start-ups. In his contribution the hon. Gentleman spoke about an additional 25,000 masters places, but the truth is that postgraduates have been a great success under this Government. We currently have 450,000 postgraduate students and 300,000 of those are in STEM—science, technology, engineering or mathematics—subjects. Over the past 10 years, STEM masters have risen 90 per cent. The record there is good, as our international success demonstrates. We are ahead of the United States and Germany, according to the OECD. Indeed, we come fourth in the OECD in terms of producing science and engineering doctorates.

David Lammy: We have had the debate across the Chamber before. The question in relation to equivalent level qualifications is whether, should I choose to do a third degree, or if the hon. Gentleman chose to do a second degree, should the people of South Holland and The Deepings cast him aside at the next general election, the state should fund our studies. My view, and our view, is that the state probably should not fund it: the hon. Gentleman should pick up the tab himself. However, there are strategically important subjects, and, if the hon. Gentleman decides that his several years in politics have not been worthwhile and he wants to take up engineering and make a serious contribution to the future of this country, perhaps we ought to consider funding that second degree. We have been strategic with the money, because we have rightly said that we should prioritise and fund those who do not have a degree at all in preference to those who are taking a second degree. That is a noble position, and it is the right one.

David Lammy: We are bringing forward an increased number of postgraduate loans for people to take up, and the hon. Gentleman will recognise that we have increased the budget for higher education by 25 per cent. precisely to ensure that the increase in provision that he wants is in place. I was at Birkbeck, university of London, last week and it has benefited from the expansion, notwithstanding the ELQ policy, as has the Open university. We will continue to support people, and the question is, what are the priorities in an economic downturn and are we getting them right? I say that we are. We cannot fund everything, and we have to be cognisant and conscious of what people are happy to fund themselves with the right support and signposting from the Government.
	Let me end by referring to another issue on which the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings spent some time—apprenticeships. I simply repeat very proudly that this Government rescued apprenticeships from near-collapse 12 years ago. We should never forget that the Conservative party tried to abolish apprenticeships, but now it has the brass neck to call for more apprenticeship places to be funded. I remember 18 months ago reminding the hon. Gentleman, across this Chamber, of the completion rates when the Conservatives were last in office, and let me remind him again: in 1997, just one quarter of apprentices completed their courses.
	The Conservatives really pulled off a trick: not only did they run the programme into the ground, with the lowest number of apprenticeships that this country has ever seen, but they managed to establish a situation in which three quarters of apprentices did not complete their courses. We have got the completion rate up this year to 65 per cent. That is a real achievement, and it is a tribute to the examiners, employers and the young people themselves. We have also increased the number of apprenticeships. We have also discussed level 3 apprenticeships across this Chamber, and there are not only more level 3 apprenticeships this year than there were when the hon. Gentleman's party left office, but more level 2 apprenticeships, so we will take no lessons from him on apprenticeships.
	The hon. Gentleman said nothing about the guarantees that we have put in place for young people facing six or 12 months of unemployment. We have established a huge fund of £1 billion for future jobs, to prevent young people—particularly those from the most deprived areas—from going into unemployment. Instead of that, the hon. Gentleman has taken the money away from union learning reps, from those who lack the basic skills of literacy and numeracy and from those who did not get GCSEs in the first place. He has set his party against the CBI and the Institute of Directors—that is the sort of contribution that the Conservative party would make to young people and this country. That is why young people are safe in the hands of this Labour Government.

Stephen Williams: We are having this debate against the background of a deep and deepening recession. However, the 2009 recession does not necessarily have the characteristics of previous recessions. It is not necessarily characterised by large lay-offs in particular trades, such as shipping and steel. Furthermore, it will not necessarily be geographically concentrated and it is not the result of an external inflationary oil price shock. This recession is primarily the result of a heart attack in the banking sector. Just like natural heart attacks, it resulted partly from ignoring all the warning signs and partly from a failure to take preventive measures. The Government are culpable on both fronts.
	The recession leads us into some uncharted waters. It will hit all sectors of the economy, including financial services—obviously—and retail. Familiar names will disappear, and have disappeared, from our high streets. The construction industry is having a particularly painful time and, as the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) said, graduates face an uncertain future. They are also leaving university with a large burden of debt.
	The Government themselves have said that they do not know how the recession will pan out; that, at least, was their excuse for not providing us with a comprehensive spending review that would have enabled us to know the context of the tough choices that all three parties will face at the next general election. Perhaps the Government are not providing it because they can predict the political future of the next six to nine months and do not want clarity about the tough choices that they will face.
	In this recession, unemployment will affect every community around the country. Before I came to this debate, I looked at the House of Commons Library synopsis of unemployment figures by constituency. My own constituency of Bristol, West is often characterised as a reasonably prosperous part of the country, and it certainly has a diverse economy. In May 2008 unemployment there stood at 1,079 adults; by May 2009—the latest month for which we have figures—unemployment there had soared to 2,042 adults. That represents an increase of 123 per cent. over those 12 months. That unemployment figure is still lower than that of 1997, but it is heading rapidly back towards it. In the neighbouring seat of Bristol, North-West, unemployment is already higher than it was 12 years ago.
	The recession will hit every age group—but particularly young people, the subject of this debate. Young people have been the main victims of the recession so far. The Government's own statistics show that 40 per cent. of those currently unemployed are under 25, despite the fact that that age group represents only 14 per cent. of the labour force. In 1997 one third of the unemployed came from that age group. In the past 12 years, the employment prospects of young people have worsened.
	When he became Prime Minister, Tony Blair talked of his ambition to build a "young Britain"; I think he even got someone else to write a book of that title for him. In fact, after 12 years of a Labour Government we have worsening unemployment prospects for young people, despite the billions that the Government have spent over that period.

Stephen Williams: I am entirely happy to provide the Minister with that clarification. The official position today is the same as it was yesterday, a year ago, and at the time of the 2005 general election. My party remains opposed to the tuition fees method of funding higher education; at the next general election I, like all my fellow candidates, will be standing on that platform. Just as at the last general election, our manifesto will be a fully costed document in which we set out how we would fund our commitments to students and graduates.
	In 2007, 6 per cent. of graduates were still unemployed after six months; in 2008, that figure had risen to 8 per cent. We do not know what will be the relevant statistic for the current cohort of graduates, but everyone expects it to be significantly worse. As was widely reported over the weekend and in this morning's newspapers, the Association of Graduate Recruiters has said that graduate job prospects are down by 24.9 per cent. this year. That is affecting employers across the piece, whether they are blue-chip companies or professional firms.
	Only last week I spoke to a colleague in chartered accountancy who said that graduate entrants into that profession, which is an enormous employer of graduates from across many different disciplines, is down by a third in many firms. As we might expect, the numbers are down in banking and financial services. The numbers going into engineering are down by 40 per cent.; as we know, the construction downturn is affecting all our constituencies. I would not like to be a new architecture graduate at any of the graduation parties taking place around the country. People who invest a significant slice of their life in qualifying to be an architect—much longer than for many other degree programmes—are entering an uncertain future.
	Overall unemployment is also predicted to increase. Most economists agree that at some point in 2010 unemployment is likely to reach 3 million again. That brings back memories for many of us in the Chamber. The Minister has mentioned his memories of the early 1990s. I am sure that some of his colleagues, like my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) and myself, will also remember the misery of the 1980s.  [ Interruption. ] Yes, perhaps even the 1970s. If this Government are still in office, Labour MPs should hang their heads in shame when we reach the statistic of 3 million people being unemployed. What a record for a Labour Government. Will they be going on marches for jobs and publishing pamphlets condemning the Government of the day, as happened in the 1980s? I somehow doubt it.
	What has been the Government's response, particularly for young people? A couple of measures were announced in the Budget. First, there was the jobs or training guarantee. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey pointed out earlier, there are many uncertainties around that programme. In order to qualify for it, a person not only has to be under 25 but must have been unemployed for more than a year. Moreover, it is not intended to start until some time early next year. It is completely uncertain how many people will benefit from it and whether it will really make a difference to young people. As my hon. Friend said, someone who is currently in work or in an apprenticeship wants protection now, rather than having to wait for a year in unemployment before relief is afforded to them.
	There was also the announcement of the future jobs fund, involving 150,000 jobs; at least a number was put on that proposal. It specified that 50,000 of those places should be in sectors such as social care—that is worthwhile area, but one of the debates that we will have at the next general election is about the size of the state—and that another 50,000 should be in so-called growth sectors. The example given was hospitality. I do not know what world the Government live in, but I would have thought that hospitality is not usually a growth sector against the background of a recession: that is a triumph of hope over experience. It also seems to be a triumph of spin over fiscal reality. The Government are keen to announce large sums of money for initiatives when there is not much clarity as to when they will start or what they will deliver, but at the same time they are cutting existing budgets—those of the regional development agencies, for instance. The South West of England Regional Development Agency has had its budget for this year cut, which means that some of the programmes that it would have funded in the city of Bristol, such as the regeneration of Stokes Croft, have had to be chopped.
	Young people leaving school or college who wish to enter higher education this year will face uncertainty as they await their A-level results. We know that the Government have cut the growth in the number of places, but why has that happened? We had a statement last week from the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills about next year's student maintenance support settlement. I remembered last year's announcement, when the Government botched their figures. Their predictions of the number of people who would qualify for student support were completely wrong. That is why they are having to cut the planned growth in the number of places this September.
	It is extraordinary to do that against a background of recession, because we know from all previous recessions that the typical response, especially of young people, is to try to shelter in education and training. It is also extraordinary when there is a bulge in the number of young people expecting to go to university. The number of 18 to 21-year-olds is about to peak, before it falls for the rest of the decade. What an extraordinary time to restrict the number of places in higher education.
	The Million+ group, which represents most of the post-1992 universities, has rightly pointed out that clearing, which has been a facet of higher education for as long as I can remember, is unlikely to be a feature this year. That will damage many universities that have had a successful record of widening participation. I also fear the effect on the fair access proportions in our research-intensive universities if they have to turn away marginal applicants.
	The Minister said that higher education places were an academically competitive process. Of course they are, but his response to the situation appeared to be—he can tell me if it is not—that someone who does not succeed this year can by all means come back next year. That will not give much relief to young people who get their A-level results this year and then find they do not have a place.

Natascha Engel: It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams), and to take part in the debate. I have been the chair of the all-party youth affairs group for about a year, I am currently the honorary president of the British Youth Council and I have been a trustee of the UK Youth Parliament. Youth issues, and at the moment especially the plight of young people during the recession, are therefore particularly close to my heart.
	I wish to pick up on a number of things that hon. Members have said, but I first make the general point that when I meet young people, as I do quite frequently during the course of events here in Parliament, I find that one really important thing is to ensure that we give them a bit of hope. What I have heard in the debate has been depressing, because without a doubt young people fare far worse during a recession than anybody else. That has always been true, and it will be true in future.
	However, we must not talk down the possibilities of what young people can do, especially those from more disadvantaged backgrounds. We need to give them hope and identify what they can do, not just to support them through the recession but to give them some idea about what they can do at the end of it. We can offer them possibilities during the recession that mean they are far better equipped to get much better work and opportunities at the end of it.
	I wish to say a big thank you to YMCA, the Foyer Federation and especially the Institute for Public Policy Research, whose youth tracker report on young people and the recession, which I hope everybody here has read, has been absolutely invaluable in considering how we can better gear our policies to ensuring that young people are not only looked after and supported through the recession but better equipped at the end of it.
	Professor Gregg of the University of Bristol said in the youth tracker report something that is worrying and that we must all bear in mind. He stated:
	"People who experience long durations of unemployment in their youth still have sizeable wage penalties in their 40s".
	We all talk about our personal experiences of recessions, but what happens to young people in the current recession will have an impact on their lives when they are in their 40s. When we look back at the policies and legislation that have been put in place in former recessions and see where people in their 40s are, we see the significance of ensuring that we look towards the future. It is in the next 20 or 30 years that the impact of the recession will be clear.
	We have to take a long-term view. That is the role of Government, and it is why the Government have put forward many of their policies. I want to emphasise the positive before I lay down some markers about things that I would change during the recession. What we are doing will support young people and give them the hope to get through the recession.
	We should use the recession as an opportunity to put right discrimination against young people, who have always been slightly discriminated against. If we consider unemployment in the past two decades, we see that when it was at a record low of 5 per cent. for the general population, the figure for young people aged between 18 and 24 was 10 per cent. That is a dramatic statistic, which shows how we as a society view young people.
	I have a criticism to make about the national minimum wage. We should use the recession to examine differential minimum wage rates. If we are considering raising the school-leaving age to 18 and if we accept the need for some sort of apprenticeship minimum wage rate, there is no excuse for a developing rate. From October, 16 to 17-year-olds will be on an hourly minimum wage of £3.57; the rate for 18 to 21-year-olds will be £4.83, and the adult rate will be £5.80. For me, it is a straightforward matter of equality. If people are doing equal jobs, they deserve equal pay. We should use the recession to tackle that.
	We should also examine the 16-hour rule. We should encourage young people, including older young people, to study, stay in education and get trained in the skills that they need to get out of the recession. As my hon. Friends know, the 16-hour rule means that people can stay at college for only 16 hours a week before being classed as studying full time, which means that a student is not available for work cannot therefore claim benefits. We want to get the most disadvantaged to study, but they need the support and security of benefits to know that they can do that, and they are massively disadvantaged by the 16-hour rule. It means that either they study too slowly to get the qualifications that they need to make them employable or they start dropping out. If I could choose only two things that I wanted to re-examine seriously, they would be the minimum wage and the 16-hour rule.

Christopher Fraser: Given the time constraints we are under, I shall try to restrict my comments to the debate in hand. However, following my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), let me say that there are many subjects beyond the motion that need separate debates.
	I am pleased to stand up for the young people of South-West Norfolk. I know that all hon. Members here will be concerned by the fact that almost 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education employment or training in the first quarter of this year. That is an issue that my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) mentioned from the Front Bench. It is also an ongoing problem that I hope the Minister took on board and which I hope the Minister responding to this debate will address. That figure is unacceptable and does our nation no good. We look to young people to help us out of this economic downturn, because their contribution to our economic success will be vital.
	Last week, we heard from the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families about the Government's plans for our schools system. I hope that the Minister will accept that not all children are necessarily academic and that vocational training provision is equally important for young people. I hope that he will address that in his closing comments.
	What is the Minister's response to the Local Government Association's suggestion that more power should be given to local councils to provide local training courses, which would be funded from a reduction in jobseeker's allowance claims? Unemployment has hit Norfolk hard, and the manufacturing sector in Thetford in particular. According to the most recent figures, the number of people on JSA has increased by almost 96 per cent. in one local authority area in my constituency and by more than 82 per cent. in another. Those are shocking figures, and many young people will inevitably be included in them, having fallen victim to the recession.
	I am aware of cases where young people have been caught by a "last in, first out" policy, which without a doubt knocks their confidence when they happen to be in their first job. I have had many letters from young people who have lost their jobs and are desperate to retrain, but are prevented from taking up a full-time course because it will take between six and 18 months to get them on one. What advice can the Minister offer young people in South-West Norfolk who want to reskill but are unable to do so for a considerable period? Does he accept that the current economic climate gives rise to a genuine need to relax the rules on jobseekers' ability to apply for full-time training courses?
	That is an issue that I have raised before in the House, as well as one on which the hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) commented. The Minister confirmed that many FE colleges structure their courses to be compliant with the 16-hour rule that operates in respect of JSA, which the hon. Lady also mentioned, but what about those who want to enter full-time training? That is an important issue, and one that increasingly fills my postbag as a constituency Member, so I would genuinely like to hear the Government's response. The fact that so many young people are eager to retrain is, of course, extremely encouraging. However, does the Minister accept that it is incumbent on the Government to ensure that all those who wish to enter training are given the access that they need?
	I would like to mention the specific challenges for those living in rural communities. Young people in South-West Norfolk have to travel longer distances to jobcentres and training courses. As a result, they face higher fuel costs. As I have said many times in this House, a car in my constituency is a necessity, not a luxury. For a young person on a course, that adds an extra financial burden that is not placed on those living in urban areas. What consideration is the Minister giving to young people living in rural areas who not only are struggling as a result of the recession, but are hampered by their geographical location? What advice can he offer them?
	Since I was elected, I have always been keen to speak out in support of the role of apprenticeships in helping our economy to flourish. However, over the past year, there has been a fall of some 8 per cent. in the number of 16 to 18-year-olds taking up apprenticeships, while for 19 to 24-year-olds the figure has fallen by just over 2 per cent. Does the Minister agree that now is the time for more people to start apprenticeship schemes, not fewer? Like other colleagues, I have seen evidence in my constituency that many of those who are halfway through their apprenticeships are being made redundant as a result of the recession. What provision is available for those young people?
	Does the Minister accept that more needs to be done to reduce the excessive red tape associated with certification and inspections, so that more companies will be encouraged to open up workplace apprenticeship schemes? Small businesses and enterprises often find it difficult to take on apprentices because of the high costs involved, despite the desire of those who run them to make a genuine effort to bring new young people into the business, train them up and help them to succeed, for the sake not only of the business but of the wider economy. Let us not forget that small business and enterprise was the backbone of our economic success in the 1980s and 1990s, and it should be the backbone of our success as we pull out of this recession.
	Let us also remember that Governments do not create jobs—businesses do. It is the role of the Government, in my constituency as much as in any other, to create the environment in which business can thrive. We have heard many words today about what the Government might or could do. Can we now focus directly on empowering business people to do their job properly, so that the fiscal stimulus that was mentioned by the Minister earlier can be directed at people so that it affects the bottom line and so that they can make a contribution accordingly? What hope can the Minister offer a small business that wants to run an apprenticeship scheme but feels unable to do so financially?
	I shall turn briefly to an issue that affects many of my colleagues in Norfolk as well as me. I make no apologies for raising the Learning and Skills Council's funding crisis and its effect on further education provision. I have raised the matter in the House before. I was dismayed by the recent announcement that only 13 out of 144 frozen college building projects have been given the go-ahead. Furthermore, all 13 are in Labour-held constituencies, and none is in Norfolk. Will the Minister look at the problems at Easton college and City college, both of which serve my constituents? They have both been left in the lurch. Does he acknowledge that this fiasco has left thousands of young people wondering whether they will be able to access the high-quality training opportunities that they deserve?
	In my constituency, a forum has been put together in support of the new Thetford college. The aim is to build an innovative education facility for 14 to 19-year-olds that will boost the local economy and provide hope for a town that has historically been associated with deprivation, social exclusion and unemployment. Does the Minister recognise that projects such as those, with strong roots in local communities across the country, must be supported and encouraged as much as possible, not just in cherry-picked constituencies but in areas where we have fought long and hard for the young people, and particularly in my area of South-West Norfolk? Young people in Norfolk and elsewhere want a bright future anchored in a good education, with excellent training opportunities and support when times are tough. What assurances can the Government give to the young people in my constituency who are afraid that their futures will be jeopardised by this recession?

Nadine Dorries: As the last speaker from the Back Benches, I have just a few short minutes, so I think I will abandon my speech and concentrate on just one of the points that I was going to make.
	I feel that I am standing here as much as a mother as an MP, because my daughter opened her university results today and we all found out what grade she had got. It was a great day for us. I have now been a university mother for six years, and my children are the first on either side of the family to go to university. We are therefore incredibly proud of them, and Jennifer is also incredibly proud of her result—[Hon. Members: "What did she get?"] I am not allowed to say.
	I want to talk about the targets for getting our young people into university. To set that in context, I would like to tell the House what I have noticed during my six years as a university mum, not only in relation to the daughter who got her degree today but to the older one as well, and to the groups of their friends who I have got to know.
	The first thing that has surprised me is the number of children who drop out in their first year. The figures that I saw when I was on the Education and Skills Select Committee were quite staggering, particularly the number of young people who drop out as a result of mental health problems and depression. It has occurred to me that some of the people doing certain courses at universities such as Newcastle and Bournemouth should not be doing those courses in the first place. They were not their courses of choice; they were the courses that they were offered subject to their GCSE results at school. They were not passionate about or even interested in the subject; they had been offered the course while going through the clearance process. Those people were often the ones who dropped out after the first year.
	Sadly, many of those young people were also getting depressed and unhappy at university because they were not doing an appropriate course. On top of that—leaving tuition fees aside—the loan that those students, and my girls, were getting was £1,000. Out of that, they were paying £300 a month for their hall of residence, £5 to use the washing machine, £3 for the dryer, and so on. The costs mounted up, and the £1,000 student loan did not go very far. It did not enable them to eat, for example, and if they came from a family that was unable to subsidise them, they would become more and more depressed.
	Students would also become depressed because they could not find employment to subsidise them while at university. An example is a student who started the course with my daughter. He applied for a job as the supervisor of a hand car wash, as he had to work in order to stay at university. He could not manage on the £1,000 student loan. He was refused the job because everyone else working at the car wash was Polish and, as he could not speak Polish, he would have been unable to supervise them. The situation was similar in every bar, café and supermarket in that town.
	That poor boy dropped out of university; he did not come back after the Christmas break. Without employment, he could not afford to stay on, but he still has his first term's student loan to pay off. Moreover, that was at a time when we were not facing a recession; it was in better times. As I said, my daughter graduated today, but she is facing a grim future. Although she will not find employment, the interest on her student loan and those of all her fellow graduates will be racking up while they try to find work. We have known for the past year that she would graduate and probably not find employment.
	Along with many hon. Members, I have employed American interns. There is one aspect of the education system in America that I really like. The academic year is split into six months for studying and six months for working, if work can be found. The students can work and save up for their six months of studying. That increases the number of students who can gain access to university. It gets more bums on seats; it gets more children through.
	I have commented on the 50 per cent. target; I think that it should be 100 per cent. Every child should be entitled to access to the type of education that they want, be it academic or an apprenticeship or whatever. I just wish that we had had access to similar educational opportunities when I was at school. The time has come to think out of the box when we look at our young people and our universities. During a recession, to say that we want to get 50 per cent. of our young people through universities, often studying inappropriate courses that will not equip them for employment even if they finish them, does them a disservice. Given what we are facing, the Government and the Opposition have a duty to take a radically different approach.
	We are burdening young people—my daughter is just one of them—with student loans and they do not know how they are going to repay them. They do not know when they will get a job and begin to repay them. The interest on student loans is racking up—it started to be payable on my daughter's loan today—yet there are no prospects of jobs.
	Will the Minister take this thought away? In other countries, where things are done differently, more people go through universities, and with less financial hardship. Perhaps we should be less dogmatic in our approach, and start to be slightly more adventurous and ambitious in how we regard our young people and the academic education that we offer them.

David Evennett: Of course I do, Madam Deputy Speaker, but when one is being barracked from a sedentary position— [Interruption.] Well, Conservative Members believe in reasoned debate.
	The Government must start a new approach to ensure that young people have a better future. As our motion highlights, we have put forward proposals to try to alleviate the recession and its effect on young people. We look to the Government to take some of our suggestions on board. Today we have discussed, for instance, funds for adult and community learners, the Government's "equivalent or lower qualifications" cuts, and the reduced opportunities for those who return to work and older people. The aim of our fund is to encourage further education enrolment and help people to acquire new skills.
	The young people of our nation face a bleak situation because of the recession. We need a Government with vision, ideas, and proposals to alleviate the current crisis and build for the future. Our motion is a positive start. The Government are decaying, out of touch and incompetent. It is time for them to go, and for us to have a new Government who can do something for our young people.

Kevin Brennan: Time is very short. As the hon. Gentleman knows, I am usually delighted to spar with him. It is, I think, testament to the strength of job creation over the past 10 years that even now, when a recession is upon us, the employment rate is higher in his constituency than it was back in 1997.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) called on us to have some hope, and I think that she was right to speak of hope for young people. One of the things that have emerged from the Government's 50 per cent. target is that more than 50 per cent. of young people from all socio-economic backgrounds now say that they want to go to university. There has been a big change in recent years, and it contrasts with some of the archaic attitudes taken by some, although not all, Opposition Members. In January 2006, when the present Mayor of London was shadow Minister for higher education, he said:
	"I wouldn't dream of having a numerical target. It's crazy to chivvy people into university when they are not suited to it."
	That typifies the attitude that is sometimes displayed by the Conservative party.
	The hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies)—whom I like immensely; we are colleagues from Wales—made what I would describe as a proper Tory contribution to the debate. He told us what he thought university and education should be all about, but rather down-played the importance of the creative sector of the economy. That is not the only part of the economy, of course, but the hon. Gentleman's speech showed that creativeness and entertainment are an important part of our national life, even if his comedy was sometimes inadvertent.
	The hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Christopher Fraser) made a serious point when he spoke of the need for local authorities to take more responsibility for 16 to 18-year-olds. That is exactly what the Government are doing through some of their further education policies. I agree that we should try to cut red tape for small businesses when it comes to apprenticeships, but I do not think that cutting Train to Gain is a very good idea if businesses are to be helped to improve the skills and aptitude of their work force. The hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford mentioned that. I hope that he will ask his Front-Bench colleagues to revisit that policy, because I do not think it would be wise to take £1 billion from Train to Gain at this time.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Learning and Skills Council. I have acknowledged in the House the mistakes made by the LSC in the capital programme, but I can tell him that there is a capital programme. There has been record investment in recent years, the LSC has announced a further half a billion pounds of investment, and the Government have a forward programme of capital investment in further education, which his party has not guaranteed to match. I urge him to talk to his Front-Bench colleagues about that.

Kevin Brennan: I shall be happy to meet the hon. Gentleman and a representative from his constituency, although as I have inherited a large backlog of meetings from my predecessor, it may not be possible before the recess.
	I, too, offer my sincere congratulations to the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) and to her daughter on her success in obtaining her degree. The hon. Lady expressed the view that a number of people should not be taking up university places, because of the drop-out rate. Her party's motion calls for us to provide more university places this autumn although we have already achieved a record level, but I accept the sincerity and seriousness of her contribution. What she said about the American system of credits was important, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property is dealing with the issue.
	A number of issues raised by both Front Benchers and Back Benchers deserve further discussion, not least that of apprenticeships. Despite the impression given by the Opposition Front-Bench team, the Government have rescued apprenticeships from oblivion. In 1997, the number of apprenticeships was dwindling to next to nothing and only 23 per cent. of that small number were completed, but we have trebled the figure. In January the Prime Minister announced a further £140 million package providing 35,000 additional places this year, which will allow us to deliver more than 250,000 apprenticeship starts. As I said, in 1997 the equivalent number of apprenticeships was 75,000, with less than a quarter being completed. I do not think that we are about to take a lesson on that from the Opposition. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) mentioned level 3. In fact, the level 3 proportion of starts for 16 to 18-year-olds is rising, and the overall number has risen this year as a proportion of the number of apprenticeships being taken.
	The subject of NEETs was also raised. We should bear in mind that people are not always in that position through no choice of their own. Some young people on gap years tend to be included in the count, as do young carers, people with disabilities, and people who volunteer. The fact is, however, that almost 80 per cent. of 16 to 18-year-olds were in education or training at the end of 2008, the highest ever rate. Six million are now working or in full-time education—the figure was 5.2 million in 1997—and the proportion of 16-year-olds not in education, employment or training is 5.2 per cent., the lowest rate for more than a decade.
	Obviously, because of the recession, the picture is serious. However, it is not entirely negative. As a result of the Government's commitment with the September offer and their commitment to apprenticeships, the number of 16 to17-year-old NEETs will fall, and more people will stay in education.
	Time is short. Let me end by saying that there was a time when it was said that unemployment was a price worth paying, and that there was no such thing as society. That is no longer the case. This Government are committed to helping young people and helping people through the recession, and we will continue to do that.

Chris Grayling: I beg to move,
	That this House believes the Government's identity cards scheme should be cancelled immediately.
	May I begin my remarks with an apology to the Home Secretary? When he made his statement about identity cards last week, I joked with him that his announcement was a fudge arranged between a new Home Secretary who wanted to scrap the ID cards scheme and a Prime Minister who did not. I had, not unsurprisingly, assumed that the result was an ugly compromise between the two, resulting in a voluntary scheme that will cost a large amount of money but will not work. I had also assumed that the Home Secretary had been forced into it in order to keep the Prime Minister off his back, but it now seems that I was completely wrong. The Prime Minister had nothing to do with last week's announcement—in fact, he did not even know all the things that the Home Secretary was going to announce. On reflection, I suppose that is hardly surprising, given that this Prime Minister is clearly no longer in control of his Cabinet, the Chancellor keeps going off piste and the Home Secretary is now joining him.
	What did surprise me was what that statement actually means. It means that the completely daft announcement made last week that the Government's flagship ID card scheme, which we were once told was designed to play a central part in the battle against terrorism, will be voluntary was not another stupid pronouncement from the Downing street bunker, but was, in fact, the brainchild of the new Home Secretary. Perhaps my apology should be to the Prime Minister and not to the Home Secretary, who was clearly off his rocker when he made that announcement. How on earth is a voluntary ID card scheme going to work? Will the terrorists sign up? Somehow, I do not see the al-Qaeda sleeper cells all rushing down to Boots with their 30 quid to make sure that they have their own ID cards. What about the organised criminals? Will the traffickers and drug smugglers all rush to sign up? Somehow, I doubt it. What about the benefit fraudsters? They probably will not sign up either. So what we are left with is a multi-billion pound ID scheme for young drinkers in pubs and the vain hope that there will be enough volunteers to pay for it.
	Although we did not agree with them, at least previous Home Secretaries appeared to have some method to what they were doing—this one appears to be taking a flight into cloud cuckoo land. How many millions of people does the Home Secretary honestly think will get up one morning saying to themselves, "I know, I'll skip the curry tonight, go down the shops and spend 30 quid on an ID card instead."? How on earth can a voluntary ID card be of any use in law enforcement?
	Let us make no mistake about it, the ID card scheme was the magic bullet that the Government told us would solve everything from crime to immigration fraud and terrorism. We were told that once it was introduced, citizens would be safe in the knowledge that there was a piece of plastic and a database that, when combined, would provide the single source of truth about a person.

Chris Grayling: The credibility of what we say will be determined by whether this scheme is right or wrong. We have argued all along that this scheme is wrong, and we are now seeing the Government back away from it. I fear that the right hon. Lady and her predecessors have written poison pill clauses into the contracts for this project that will make it much more difficult for a future Government to back away from the scheme. I will happily give way to the right hon. Lady again if she can tell us that there are no such clauses in any of the contracts that would tie the hands of a future Government. If this Government are tying the hands of their successor, as I fear they may be, that is an unacceptable practice by any Administration. It may make it harder for us to do the right thing, but it will not stop us. The right hon. Lady does not appear to want to intervene on that point.

Chris Grayling: It does indeed speak volumes, but then very few positive reasons for the scheme remain. One reason why I was taken aback by the reports at the weekend was that I thought that the new Home Secretary had realised that and was trying to scrap the scheme outright. I was disappointed to discover that that was not the case. We will have to await the arrival of the new Government to secure that change.
	Of course, the battle over ID cards between Ministers has been played out over the airwaves and the newspaper columns for some time now. We have seen an array of different opinions aired about how best to either keep or end the scheme. In March, the then Home Secretary insisted that the scheme was going ahead. She said:
	"We are on track to introduce identity cards this autumn, and we have already started to issue ID cards for foreign nationals. Next month, we plan to award two contracts for the national identity scheme".—[ Official Report, 23 March 2009; Vol. 490, c. 15.]
	However on 28 April, a national newspaper reported a "senior Cabinet minister" as saying:
	"My sense is that ID cards will not go ahead. We have to find savings somewhere, and it would be better to shelve schemes like this that aren't popular."
	On the same day, another former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) also called for the ID card scheme to be scrapped, in favour of mandatory biometric passports. Asked whether ID cards could be dropped, he said:
	"I think it is possible to mandate biometric passports. Most people already have a passport but they might want something more convenient to carry around than the current passport and may be able to have it as a piece of plastic for an extra cost."
	Then on 29 April, when asked at the Institute of Directors conference if he supported ID cards, the Chancellor rowed back and said:
	"ID cards are an interesting point because the lion's share of the expenditure is going on biometric passports. People are rightly concerned about who comes in and who goes out of this country. Your old conventional bog-standard passport was okay but it was not too difficult to improvise, shall I say. The biometrics means that it's very much more difficult. That is the bigger cost."
	So he made a commitment to biometric passports, but was very cautious about ID cards.
	When the current Home Secretary took over, things looked much brighter for those opposing ID cards. He reportedly launched an urgent review of the identity card scheme, paving the way for a possible U-turn on the policy. A source was quoted as saying:
	"Alan is more sympathetic to the civil liberties arguments than previous home secretaries. He is genuinely open minded. He wants to see all the evidence and then he will make his decision before the end of the summer".
	Statutory instruments relating to the scheme were due to be debated this week but have now been postponed.

Keith Vaz: It is not the fact that Ministers have made different statements at different times that concerns some of us: it is the fact that we now have a scheme that will be compulsory for some people who are resident in this country and voluntary for others. It is the two-tier system that is being created that is the real problem.

Bob Spink: Can the hon. Gentleman explain to the House what the Conservative party intends to do to tighten up controls on foreign nations who work and live in this country, if it does not go forward with an ID scheme?

Chris Grayling: My right hon. Friend has raised a valid point that I had planned to come on to in a moment. The truth is that the national identity register establishes a level of data collection that goes far beyond anything that has ever been required for passports or that even needs to be required for a system of biometric passports. It remains our intention, as it was when my right hon. Friend was shadow Home Secretary, not to proceed with the national identity register. I see little reason why the rules that apply to the application for a passport should change radically given the current circumstances. To extend those rules to a national identity register such as that proposed by the Government at a time when the nation's finances are straitened and when genuine questions arise about civil liberties seem to suggest that it is a project that we do not need to pursue.
	We need clear answers to some of the questions that remain before the Government. The terms of the motion that we have tabled gives the House a clear choice to vote for or against the scheme. First, can we have some transparency about the existing contracts and the amount of taxpayers' money that has been spent already? More to the point, how much public money has been committed to the scheme?
	As the House will know, I have written to the contracting groups—as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) before me—to advise them that a Conservative Government will cancel the scheme. I repeat that warning today. One of the first acts of an incoming Conservative Government will be to cancel the ID scheme. The scheme and the register are an affront to British liberty, have no place in a Conservative Britain and are a huge waste of money.

Chris Grayling: We will certainly cancel the national identity register. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we might be in a position in which, in order to allow people to travel to the United States, we need to process biometric data and to pursue the introduction of biometric passports. We have not backed away from the biometric passport option and, I understand, nor has he. Clearly, data collection will be necessary for biometric passports. However, it is not our intention to proceed with a compulsory national identity register.
	What do the Government intend—this relates to the point made by the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne)—to include in the national identity register? Section 4 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 gives the Secretary of State the power to designate certain documents under the Act, such as passports. As the explanatory notes to the Act make clear, that means that
	"if, as is intended, passports were designated documents, an individual in applying for a passport must at the same time include an application to be entered in the Register if he is not already entered in the Register".
	The Home Office consultation on secondary legislation on ID cards, published in November, reaffirmed the Government's intention to designate passports. It said:
	"once passports are designated under the Act, it will be possible to record each individual's identity details, including fingerprint biometrics, on the National Identity Register"
	The Government proposed holding applicants' referees' details on the register, too. That is very different from the process of simply applying for a biometric passport, as the hon. Member for Eastleigh will, I am sure, agree.
	The Home Office's spurious idea of what is voluntary was demonstrated when the consultation went on:
	"Designation is not the same as 'compulsion' as there is no penalty if someone chooses not to apply for a designated document".
	However, as we discovered this afternoon when my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) asked his question, it appears that one cannot "unvolunteer" for one of these passports. I would be interested to hear the Home Secretary's confirmation of that.

Alan Johnson: I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and add:
	"acknowledges the continued and growing problem of identity fraud in the UK; accepts that a universally accepted biometric passport or identity card linked to a national identity register will help secure the identity of an individual and reduce the incidence of multiple identity fraud; further recognises that for certain groups, including young people, an identity card will enable them to provide proof of age and more broadly enable people to travel throughout Europe; considers that it is right that non-European Economic Area foreign nationals should be obliged to apply for an identity card which provides a simple and effective method of determining the right of residence and entitlement to employment and benefits; welcomes the fact that for those joining the National Identity Service there will be a choice between identity cards and biometric passports; and notes the fact that any decision on whether membership of the scheme should be compulsory would require further legislation."
	My hon. Friend the Minister for Borders and Immigration is hot-footing it from Heathrow even as I speak, and will reply to the debate.
	Having spent my first few weeks as Home Secretary looking at this issue again from first principles, I am more convinced than ever that the national identity service is a sane and rational policy that needs to be implemented rather than scrapped, and accelerated rather than delayed. When I announced the results of my deliberations in a written ministerial statement to the House last week, it was reported in  The Guardian as
	"a decision to press ahead with the main elements of the national identity card scheme",
	and by  The Independent as
	"the last rites for ID cards".
	 The Guardian, as so often, actually got it right.
	The policy was forged following full public consultation and a supportive report by the Home Affairs Committee in 2004. The former leader of the Conservative party, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said in December of that year:
	"We must protect our citizens in every way we can and in my judgement, that includes ID cards."
	I was fascinated to hear in the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer) that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) supported ID cards. I have it here in front of me now: on 23 January 2002, under the heading "Identity Card—Motion for leave to introduce a Bill", just 13 Conservative Members supported that Bill, one of whom was the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell. So we have a consensus, and his speech can be read as an effort to say, "We'll introduce an identity card scheme," because most of what he said related to what the Government could or could not do, and I suspect that we have found a covert supporter of the policy. Of course, he would not be alone, with so many other Conservative Members supporting the policy, too.

Alan Johnson: This is not a devolved issue, as the hon. Gentleman knows. Of course, we have made it clear since 2007 that if people want to use their biometric passports, which all parties agree on, as their identity card, there is no need for them to get an identity card as well. Their passports will do to verify their identity.
	As I understand it, there three essential arguments being deployed against the introduction of identity cards. The first is that they are unnecessary, the second is that they are too expensive, and the third is that giving people a single, safe and secure way to verify and protect their identity—for the benefit of the hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir), I should explain that that is the justification for the cards—will damage civil liberties.

Alan Johnson: I shall come to cost in a moment. As for airside workers, we expect that ID cards would be made free to them for the next 18 months. We expect that removing the argument about whether identity cards are compulsory and ensuring that those workers get the same benefit as all other British citizens from a voluntary scheme will mean that we can speed up the process and get much wider coverage over the next 18 months.
	The details of the 80 per cent. of people who have a passport appear on the UK passport database. The DWP allocates national insurance numbers and holds personal details and benefits records. The upshot is that whenever a GP surgery, employer, job centre, bank or passport agency tries to verify someone's identity, they have no foolproof way of doing so, which makes it both easier for people to create multiple identities and more burdensome for people to prove their identity.
	Identity fraud has grown, not diminished, since the debate began in 2004. The UK's fraud prevention service, the credit industry fraud avoidance system—CIFAS—estimates that the incidence of fraud whereby someone impersonates a victim in order to take over their bank account more than tripled between 2007 and 2008. A study in the US has ascertained that each time an identity is stolen it takes the victim, once they are aware, an average of 330 hours to sort everything out and claim back their own identity.
	The question is: do we need to deal more effectively with the problems of identity fraud, which is a feature of illegal working, benefit fraud and terrorism? The answer must surely be yes. Will a national identity register help? Of course it will. The introduction of fingerprint biometric passports from 2012 will secure identities much more effectively for 80 per cent. of the adult population. The details of everyone aged 16 or over who applies for a passport will no longer be held on the passport database but on the national identity register, and will be linked to their unique biometric data.
	Just like the current passport database, the national identity register will record someone's name, date and place of birth. It will also record their current address. It would not hold details of any criminal record or any medical information. Like the DVLA database, it will require people to update their details when their name or address changes. It will be overseen by an independent identity commissioner, and all arrangements for sharing data will be subject to parliamentary approval. Unlike any other existing databases, any unauthorised disclosure of information in the national identity register will be a specific criminal offence that could lead to two years' imprisonment. Tampering with the register could lead to a 10-year sentence.
	The second argument is about cost. If identity cards were scrapped today, it does not follow that the Government would save any money at all. Of the total cost of £4.95 billion, 70 per cent. is for the systems to produce the new biometric passport, which the Opposition support. A further £379 million is for the compulsory scheme for foreign nationals, which the Opposition also support. Over 10 years, the operating costs of identity cards will be recovered through fees, so they are not a charge on general taxation over that period. Any initial savings from scrapping identity cards would be offset by the loss in fees that they would generate, which would make a significant contribution to the costs of technology and other systems necessary for the introduction of biometric passports.
	The third argument is the civil liberties argument, which unites the Liberals with the libertarians. Holding an identity card is not a new concept for people in the UK. In the second world war, all British citizens were issued with an identity card that showed their name and address and an identity card number, which was held on a national register. When this requirement was abolished seven years after the war ended, the national register was transferred to the newly formed NHS. Identity cards do not create or extend the Big Brother society; they are an attempt to control it— [Laughter.] They are also an attempt to give every individual a greater right to determine the use of their own identity, where so many wish to abuse it. I presumed that that was the reason why the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell supported the concept in 2002. I do not know why he is laughing now.
	In today's world, people invariably carry a range of plastic cards because they are required to prove their identity regularly. We need them to get into our place of work, to access cash, to pay our bills. Everyday events such as signing a tenancy agreement, starting a new job, or registering at a new doctor's surgery require people to produce not only their passport but a selection of any number of other documents to prove their identity—utility bills, driving licence, payslips, birth certificates, six months' worth of bank statements, all carried around by people in an attempt to prove that they are who they say they are. Many people would much rather produce their biometric passport or a credit card-sized ID card that fits easily into a wallet than waste time trawling through their personal paperwork, and many are likely to choose the £30 identity card over the £72 passport.
	It is wrong to suggest that identity cards will make it possible for the Government or other bodies to repress or restrict liberty in any way. The Leader of the Opposition recently used an argument as spurious as his cod German accent when suggesting that it would. As is set out in law by the Identity Cards Act 2006, it will never be a requirement to carry an identity card at all times, and the police will have no new powers to stop people and demand that they produce their papers.
	Private organisations will be able to access any information held about an individual on the national identity register only with that individual's consent. Police and security services would be able to do so only under specific provisions approved by Parliament. There is no question of the national identity register being used to compile information about people's political or religious beliefs, or their criminal or financial records. It will hold only the most basic, personal details, and substantially less than the personal records held by the NHS, the DVLA, or the Department for Work and Pensions. Everyone will have the right to see the information held on their record, and the names of any organisations that may have checked their identity against that record.
	I point out again that the Opposition parties support the introduction of biometric passports, which will necessitate a register and will be available from 2011. They support our policy of compelling foreign nationals from non-EEA countries to have an identity card. Apparently, they do not think that the arguments of necessity, cost and civil liberties apply in the areas where, as I have explained, the majority of the costs are incurred.

Alan Johnson: It is a puzzle why Opposition Members support not just the passport but the necessary register of information. There seem to be some differences between the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden, who has now left his seat, and the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell. There is certainly a difference between the two Opposition Front-Bench teams. I respect the fact that the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) has been consistent, but the official Opposition accept the need for biometric passports, and therefore must surely accept the need for a register of who has those biometric passports. They argue that, having established a system to lock in a person's identity in that way, we should not give our citizens the option of a card rather than a passport. That is the argument. Our argument is very clear: people do not need to have an identity card if they wish to use their biometric passport as their form of identity. Her Majesty's official Opposition say, "No, no. If they want to take a more convenient route and have a card, they shouldn't be allowed to do it."

Christopher Huhne: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing that out, and I simply return to the point that I was trying to make. When I was shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I looked at Government IT schemes and found that more than four in five such schemes right across the Government had exceeded their original budget. If the Home Secretary believes that he is going to stay within his budget, he is living in cloud cuckoo land.
	The Home Office has already pushed a substantial part of the scheme's cost beyond the planning period, so we do not really know whether the cost that the Home Secretary has mentioned is the full cost or merely the cost as currently shown in the planning period. I notice that nobody from the Treasury Bench is attempting to clarify that point, but I should be pleased if they did.

Christopher Huhne: I agree.
	The Government have rightly climbed down on applying for cards, and airside workers will no longer be forced to have them. Indeed, no British national with a vote in the forthcoming general election will need to have an ID card, and that perhaps tells us just how popular the Government really think this laminated poll tax is going to be. But that is only part of the argument. If people want to travel, they will need a passport and their biometric data will be entered on the national identity register. They will be subject to penalties of up to £1,000 in fines if they do not keep the register up to date, for example, with address changes.
	The Government have merely devised a new route by which they will collect the data of four in five of the population who have a passport: have passport, will travel, will be registered on the identity database. If that is choice and if that is voluntary, it is the same choice that the taxman gives the taxpayer. The Treasury says, "Pay taxes or go to jail." The Home Office says, "Join the national identity register or give up foreign holidays."

Christopher Huhne: The hon. Gentleman anticipates my next comment. The database would provide a check against the issue of duplicate passports or ID cards with the same biometric data. However, the Government have not provided any evidence that there would be a substantial problem. Nothing in what the Home Office has proposed indicates that it would be worth paying £5 billion for that benefit—let alone the £20 billion that the LSE estimates the project will ultimately cost us.
	Other states do not think that there would be a substantial problem. Those lucky European states that we inoculated after the war against nanny state intrusion, such as Germany—not Sweden, I should say the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton)—do not allow such centralised databases, and for very good reason. They know how databases can be abused; they suffered from them during the Nazi period and under Vichy France. That is why we should not begin to go down this route.

Martin Linton: I have heard some more well turned phrases, but I still do not understand the distinction that the hon. Gentleman is making. He seems to support a database of people who have biometric passports. He is not against biometric passports, fingerprints or the recording of facial images—he just does not want to call the database of people with biometric passports a "national identity register". The only real difference is that it is now to be called that. The police and the security services already have access to Passport and Records Agency information—

Stephen Dorrell: I would apply the same strictures to information held by all parts of the public sector, such as the national health service and the education service. I do not share the hon. Gentleman's innate suspicion of private as against public. Indeed, I suspect that recent experience suggests that the public sector has been a less effective guardian of the privacy of the individual than the private sector.
	The key point, surely—I suspect that the hon. Gentleman and I can agree on this—is that information should not be held on databases unless there is a serious reason for it to be held there, and unless there are serious safeguards in relation to what information is collected, the way in which it is held, and the people to whom it is made available. What worries me about this whole policy area is that the Government have been too free and easy, that the burden of proof has been too easily discharged over the development of the database and the extension of the uses to which it can be put, and that, when we analyse the supposed benefits of a serious increase in the scale of information available for manipulation in the totally technical sense of the word—information available for use by the Government—the Government's policy has not been given sufficient weight in the cost-benefit analysis.
	I believe that the Government's approach to this policy has been fundamentally frivolous. It has been policy by press release, not policy driven by a desire to deliver hard results. What we have learnt about this Government as the policy has evolved is that they do not possess the instinctive understanding that I believe a British Government ought to have of the importance of the privacy of the private citizen. That is why I will support my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Lobby tonight.

Nick Palmer: I put my name down to speak in the debate partly because, as mentioned earlier, I proposed the introduction of identity cards before it became fashionable on the Labour Benches. I benefited not only from the support of the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) but from that of the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) and that of the distinguished hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). When the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) said that the Liberal Democrats had consistently opposed the policy, he was forgetting the record of his colleagues and his predecessor. However, I was not totally on message when I presented my Bill, and I will not be totally on message tonight either, because I think that there is a case for delaying the implementation of the card aspects of the scheme. I shall say more about that shortly.
	One of the striking features of public opinion over the years is how stably it has remained in favour of this project, despite almost universal media opposition to it. Barely a single newspaper is prepared to put in a good word for the identity card scheme; the reason why support remains quite strong—significantly stronger than support for any of the three major parties, I would say—is that people feel, intuitively, that it makes sense.
	I think that people should ask themselves two basic questions before deciding whether, in principle, they favour an identity scheme. First, they should ask how often they actually wish to pretend to be someone else. Secondly, they should ask how concerned they would be if someone pretended to be them. Most people would reply "I never want to pretend to be someone else, and I would be concerned if someone pretended to be me." On the basis of intuition, it is still widely accepted that it is a good idea to have a way of verifying the basic claim that people are who they claim to be. We are one of the very few countries in the world where establishing someone's identity consists in part of their producing a gas bill. There is a lot to be said for a verifiable approach.

Nick Palmer: Well, I am sure that is true, but my contention is that if we had the register without the cards, that would still fulfil the crime prevention aspect but it would not fulfil the consumer aspect.
	The first thing to do, which we have got right, is to make it absolutely clear that the cards are not compulsory now and never will be. Several speakers have said that the Bill always stated that there would be the need for further primary legislation to make them compulsory, but we were ambiguous as to whether that would happen. If they are intended to help the consumer, as I contend, the first step in building confidence in that objective is to make it clear that they are voluntary. If they are voluntary, the question of their being an imposition—something that restricts people's liberty—does not arise, because if someone does not want one, all they have to do is say, "No, I will not have it." The Government have taken an important step forward on that.
	The next thing that we need to address is the audit trail, which has barely been mentioned this evening. One of the main objections of libertarians, including so many Liberal Democrat voters, even though the hon. Member for Eastleigh has not stressed this issue, relates to the audit trail, because they suggest that by keeping track of the number and type of organisations that have inquired about the identity of an individual one can build up a picture of the kind of person that individual is and that that could be used against them to try to profile them as being a higher or lower risk. That genuine issue needs to be addressed, although I hope that such a situation would not arise.
	The original reason why the audit trail was to be included was to protect people and give them the reassurance that they could see which organisations had been looking at their data. If we are serious about that and it really is the purpose of the audit trail, we should give the individual the power either to dispense with the audit trail or to edit it. By "edit", I mean that if the trail records that I had visited a particular bank on a particular date, I would be able to look up the record to verify that, ensure that no entries had been made that I did not authorise and then choose, if I so wished, to say that I wanted the record deleted, and all that would then be left would be a note saying that I had deleted a record on such and such a date. If we were to introduce such a power, we would go a long way towards reassuring people who are afraid that the database will, in some way, be used to profile them. If the purpose of the audit trail is to protect people, we should be willing to introduce such a power.
	We need to distinguish between the urgent and the merely desirable.

David Davis: The hon. Gentleman has been making a thoughtful speech. One of the things that I object to about the national identity register is its sheer comprehensiveness. As the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) pointed out, it is one thing to have a register that, in essence, includes simply one's identifiable aspects—one's name and address, and biometrics—but it is another thing entirely for it to contain the other 49 elements. Would the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer) be willing to countenance having a register that contains only the identity mechanisms, nothing else?

Patrick Mercer: It is a pleasure to follow my neighbour, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer).
	I wonder what the good folk of Manchester have done to have this wretched scheme visited on them. This whole argument bores me stiff, because I have been over-exposed to a policy and theory that should have been settled a long time ago. I have no doubt that Labour Members will point out my voting record, because I supported the proposals as a shadow Minister. At the time, we were broadly in support of the proposition. After the 2005 election, too, I sat through endless weeks of drivel, as the case was made time and again, in painful and needless detail, by which time we opposed the Government's proposals.
	This issue bores me because the Government will not come clean about it. The reason why I and others supported the measure originally was not because it was claimed to be a particularly powerful tool against terrorism. I can see that there may be advantages to the scheme provided that it works, that we can afford it, and that the cards cannot be forged. However, I cannot buy the argument that the card would ever be able to control, or even deter, terrorists. After the 2005 election the Government changed their position, and the prevention of terrorism became the principal argument for the card. I could not understand that, which is why I voted against the scheme the second time round.
	I am sorry if I am ranting, but I am delighted that the Minister is in his place—I know from his record and his conduct that he will listen carefully to what I have to say. I am probably the only person in the Chamber tonight who has seen an identity card scheme—although that is a slight misnomer, as I shall explain—being put into practice to try to counter terrorism. We have already heard that identity cards were in place in this country during the second world war and for seven years afterwards. That is not the scheme that I mean; I was not around then, although I may look old enough. The scheme I mean was the introduction of a driving licence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It was never claimed to be an identity card or a tool to counter terrorism, but it was described to the security forces—I was a serving officer at the time—as a crucial tool against, principally, the Provisional IRA.
	The driving licence had to be carried in Northern Ireland, and it was not like the simple piece of green paper that we carried in England, Scotland and Wales at the time. It was a more complex bit of kit. Initially it contained a photograph, and then it was further improved to contain a thumbprint or fingerprint. For the first couple of tours I did in Northern Ireland, the card was not in being. As I recall, it was introduced in 1978, and by the time that I returned in 1979 we were told in pre-deployment training, "Gentlemen, this is the answer. The Provisionals in particular use vehicles in the day-to-day execution of their business. You will, as a result of this card, be able to clamp down on individuals. It is not easy to forge—you will be able to see forgeries—and you will be able to identify those who are opposing you." Let us not forget that this was long before databases and computerised intelligence work.
	We bought this argument hook, line and sinker, but the fallacy of it was brought home to me about two o'clock on a rain-sodden night on a hillside in South Armagh, when any sensible Christian man would have been tucked up in bed rather than cuddling a rifle on the side of the road. We eventually saw a pair of headlights approaching us through a blackthorn hedge, and I sent two soldiers down to stop the vehicle and find out what was going on. They flagged the vehicle down and about three minutes later they came chasing back through the driving rain and said, "Right sir, he's fine. He's absolutely fine." "How do you know he's fine?" "He had one of these new driving licences—he's got to be all right." Suddenly, from being a tool to counter terrorism this driving licence turned into a pass that, in the eyes of the simple soldiers whom I was looking after, meant that that particular bloke was all right. Well, he was not.
	Let me go on to give another example. In January 2006, in a mess hall of the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, just outside Baghdad, someone who was allegedly an Iraqi policeman came into the mess hall with a 100 lb device contained in webbing about his body and blew himself to pieces. He killed 17 American soldiers and injured about 35. When questioned afterwards about how this "alleged policeman" had got into the mess hall, the guard on the gate said, "Well, he had a pass on him." He had an identity card on him. In other words, in the examples that I have just given the Minister, these various cards—far from fighting terrorism—aided and abetted terrorism. The Minister might well challenge me on the Northern Ireland driving licence scheme, and we can discuss it if he has time, but that was certainly my experience.
	I also found it quite extraordinary, during the endless iterations of Committees that I had to sit through, that the Government made it quite clear—or at least implied—that the scheme was not going to be voluntary at all. Yes, the inception would be voluntary, but enabling legislation was put in place that meant that, at the drop of a hat, identity cards and the concomitant costs could suddenly have become compulsory.
	There were also howlers that came with that legislation that made no sense whatsoever. For instance, if someone was not resident in the United Kingdom for a period of more than three months, they did not need an identity card. How could that possibly match up to the Government's claim that the cards would be an important tool against terrorists? Not all terrorists are home-grown. It is fascinating, for instance—as tomorrow is the anniversary of the bombings in 2005—that all four men involved in those bombings were home-grown passport-carrying Britons, yet they felt the need to carry multiple forms of identity on their bodies so that their dead bodies could be identified. In that case, had there been an identity card scheme in place, far from hindering those gentlemen, if that is the right term, in the execution—bad pun—of what they were doing to themselves, one of the documents that they would have carried would have been the very identity card that the Government have billed as a crucial tool against terrorism.
	We will also find that that situation is impossible to solve if someone is a native or citizen of the Free State of southern Ireland. In other words, the southern Irish—people from Eire—living and working in this country will not be required to carry an identity card. We might think that it is all over in Northern Ireland and in Ireland as a whole, but, as the events of a few weeks ago at Massereene barracks and elsewhere showed, it patently is not.
	I would suggest that there might be arguments for the card—theoretical arguments, in some ways—if, as I have already said, I thought that we could afford it, if I did not think that it was a gross intrusion on civil liberties, if I did not think that the cards could be forged, if I did not think that the Government were incapable of putting the scheme in place and, most importantly, if the Government would stop constantly shifting the ground on which they make their arguments. If they would come clean about the fact that the scheme is a menace, and not a nuisance, they could, in my eyes at least, recover some of the credibility that they had in the past. As things are, however, the scheme must be scrapped: it is expensive and a pest, and will aid terrorists rather than hindering them.

Damian Green: I see no advantages to the identity card scheme, and I could happily discuss it with my colleagues in local government.
	We all now agree that ID cards will not prevent terrorism; that is now of no dispute between anyone. They certainly will not prevent illegal immigration, because foreign visitors will not have to have an ID card unless they plan to stay in the UK for more than three months. They will not prevent identity fraud. Microsoft's national technology officer, Jerry Fishenden, has said that introducing ID cards would make the problem even worse, warning that it could
	"trigger massive identity fraud on a scale beyond anything we have seen before".
	 [ Interruption. ] The Minister for Borders and Immigration asks how, but I suggest that he talk to Microsoft. We are five years into the scheme—why does he not talk to one of the world's biggest and most successful computer companies about the effects of his policy?
	The Government should have spent time and resources on ensuring that biometric passports were secure. In November 2006, an investigation by  The Guardian found that the passports could be electronically attacked and cloned with a microchip reader costing £174. A computer expert took 48 hours to write software that could take all the information from the chips.
	How have the Government got to the current situation? Contrary to all the assertions about opinion polls showing that ID cards were popular, when real people—airport workers in Manchester and London City airport—were told that they had to have identity cards, they rebelled. Neither the airlines nor the airline workers wanted them. Nobody wanted them, so the Government promptly retreated. As a good former trade union official, the Home Secretary recognised that the trade unions were against the idea, so—as Labour Ministers do when faced with trade union rebellions—he retreated and announced a U-turn.
	Previously, the Home Secretary had claimed that, despite their resistance, the airport workers had to have an ID card for security reasons. Now, however, the pilots are to be voluntary. One of the most absurd bits of last week's announcement came when the Home Secretary claimed that he was accelerating the roll-out of ID cards. I gently suggest to him and the Minister for Borders and Immigration that given our discussions today, in various forms around the House, of the fines of up to £1,000 for which people will make themselves liable if they take a voluntary ID card, the voluntary take-up will be particularly small.
	That brings me to the subject of costs, which has dominated a lot of the debate. The bad news for the Minister for Borders and Immigration, who is about to wind up, is that the Home Secretary was completely and characteristically honest about the issue—he said that he had no idea how many people would voluntarily take up the card. If the Government have no idea about that, they can have no idea of the cost to the taxpayer. Everything that Ministers say about the cost is bogus; they do not know any more about it than anyone else.
	None of the rest of us knows much about the cost because Ministers have spent the past few years energetically trying to hide it. They keep asserting that 70 per cent. of the cost is due to the passports and that only 30 per cent. will go on ID cards—although 30 per cent. of £5 billion seems a lot of money and worth saving to me. However, even if what they say is true, the Government have adduced no detailed evidence for the assertion; they have not allowed anyone to look at any of the accounts, but simply repeat the assertion. We simply cannot know how much preserving biometric passports but not proceeding with an identity card scheme or the national identity register would save. On that point, I reassure the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) that we could happily have imported his party's amendment into ours; we are as strongly against the national identity register as he is. It is one of the central things that are wrong.
	One of the other myths perpetuated this evening is that the passport database is essentially the same as the national identity register. I commend schedule 1 to the Identity Cards Act 2006 to all those who have been peddling that myth; they should read the list of the information that may be recorded on the identity register. The list includes:
	"the 'audit log' of how and when any information from an entry was provided to any person or body."
	Any attempt by anyone to look at a person's records gets registered.  [Interruption.] The Home Secretary says that that is absolutely right. There is much more on the national identity register— [Interruption.] We do know, although some of the right hon. Gentleman's colleagues do not seem to. They seem to think that the information is the same as that on a passport, but it absolutely is not—it is much greater and more intrusive than the information that would be on the passport database, and it would be dishonest of the Government to claim otherwise.
	The scheme is not wrong only in cost terms. A Conservative Government would scrap the scheme not just because it is a waste of money—it is also wrong. The Government do not understand a simple, obvious truth: we cannot defend our liberties by sacrificing them. We have taken a principled stance against the Government's control state. We are fundamentally opposed to the Orwellian society that Labour is trying to create through schemes such as this. Privacy International—the Home Secretary should be ashamed of this—now ranks Britain as the most invasive surveillance state and the worst at protecting individual privacy of any western democracy. That is what we have come to after 12 years of new Labour Government.  [ Interruption. ] The Home Secretary is objecting to Privacy International, which is no doubt another body that he has no time for. Frankly, however, he must recognise that ID cards are a bad idea whose time has never come.
	Anyone who cares about either freedom and privacy or the state of the public finances—some of us care about both—will vote for our motion. The ID scheme is a sickly policy that needs to be put out of its misery. If this Government will not do that, the Conservatives will do it if we win the election. I commend our motion to the House.

Phil Woolas: No, I will not, because I want to bust the other myth, too.
	The cost of the scheme is covered by the fee, so the accusation that it is a waste of public money is false. Further, the Conservatives' own public finance policy is based on the idea that they can save money by scrapping the ID scheme, but the fact that it is a gross cost before income shows that there is not money to save by doing that. Once again, there is a black hole in their argument.

Alistair Burt: Before we leave the subject of funding, may I come back to a point that I made earlier? If the Department agrees that the proposal put forward by Bedford, whether for a three-tier or a two-tier system for the improvement of schools, as appropriate, does all the money arrive up front before the election and before the clamps come down, or is the future funding in doubt because inevitably it will be funded year by year post-2010, and none of us knows how much money there will be in the kitty then?